


Red, Red, Red

by scioscribe



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Comes Back Wrong, Dark Magic, Extra Trick, M/M, Post-Canon, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-05 02:45:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12181383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: A shadow fell across them. “Because we are all so damn sick to death of trying to hire a sheriff, that’s why. Now we have you and we’re gonna keep you.”Mannix’s priority at this revelation was to say to Warren, “See, I wasn’t lying after all.”The shadow said, “You two ended up mixing your blood so much you came as a two-for-one deal—had to, if we were going to get you anything like whole.” He nudged Warren with the toe of his boot. “So you’re welcome. And I guess since you’re here, you’re employed too.”





	Red, Red, Red

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



> You doomed me to this with that prompt about why on earth a town would hire a sheriff it had never met before. <3 I hope you like the results!

Then:

Numbness so pervasive he didn’t feel tethered to his body at all. Once he did again, it was worse. The numbness was still there—even the bare rock and its patches of ice were there only through layers and layers of cotton batting, like he was really nestled in some little keepsake box, wadded up away from everything in case he broke—but the numbness was nothing next to that awful, puppet-like drag between what he wanted his body to do and what it did. Every movement half a second late. He was nothing but some tool he was using, and a faulty one at that: a gun with a broken firing pin or a saddle with a loose strap.

Warren remembered dying. It had been better than this.

He was on some immense, freezing expanse of rock as smooth as slate and as red as blood. His clothes were tacky and stiff, with his blood and Mannix’s, but also with something thicker, stickier, _sweeter_ , black and clotted. His hands were covered in what looked like chalk. Something twigged in his memory. Mannix.

He moved his head sideways. Mannix was there too, his eyes barely open, as red and black and chalky white as Warren himself, and with something else, too: something on his lips that was almost blue-violet. Ink?

“Major.” Warren could make out what he was saying, but he didn’t know how. It almost seemed like someone had come along and stripped out all the vowels. “You got colors all over you.”

“Yeah. You too.” He could hear he sounded the same— _yuh’tuh_ —but his mouth wouldn’t work the way he wanted it to.

“Why?”

A shadow fell across them. “Because we are all so damn sick to death of trying to hire a sheriff, that’s why. Now we have you and we’re gonna keep you.”

Mannix’s priority at this revelation was to say to Warren, “See, I wasn’t lying after all.”

The shadow said, “You two ended up mixing your blood so much you came as a two-for-one deal—had to, if we were going to get you anything like whole.” He nudged Warren with the toe of his boot. “So you’re welcome. And I guess since you’re here, you’re employed too.”

“Fuck you.” Warren made the thing that was his body sit up. To his right, Mannix tried to imitate him and only made it halfway before falling back again. He let his head smack against the rock like it was nothing to him. There would have been a joke in there if Warren were in the mood to find anything at all funny. “I didn’t sign up to wear any kind of tin star. For that matter, I was never even willing to spend the night in this godforsaken place.”

“Well, you got that last part right. We surely are a little godforsaken.” The shadow, now revealed by Warren’s new angle to be a tall, skinny white man with tobacco-brown eyes, smiled. His teeth were rust-red and just a little too long. “But we deserve our civilization just like anybody else, Major Warren, and we did pay you gold and silver every time you came here, and you did take it. And you ate of our bread. Red Rock has its claim on you, and now so does the Rock.”

He said it like a preacher would say the name of God.

“So you’ll wear that star,” the shadow said. “Because I think you’ll find you sure as shit can’t do anything else and live.”

“This ain’t living,” Mannix said, having finally managed to get himself upright. His face was just about as white as his hands.

It wasn’t anything to the shadow, who just shrugged. “The feeling will come back to you. More or less.”

The shadow gave them a ride into town, which he seemed to think qualified as hospitality. It was OB’s old stagecoach and while Warren managed to stay on the seat, Mannix ended up on the floor, jostled silly, his teeth chattering.

“Ain’t you cold, major?”

“No,” Warren said shortly.

Mannix seemed to realize that not feeling the stark winter cold they were stuck in was just as bad, or worse, as him shivering himself to death, because he lurched over some and settled himself down with his back against Warren’s legs, like he’d mistaken himself for a blanket, or maybe just a loyal hound.

“What’s wrong with Red Rock?”

“Everything,” Warren said. “Starting with them being willing to make your ass sheriff and ending with them raising us from the fucking dead.”

“I can’t _talk_ right,” Mannix said, almost spitting in frustration.

“What do you have that feels worth saying?”

Mannix tilted his head back and looked at him: it was a strange relief to see that his eyes were still that same unclouded hazel. “Come on now, major. You’re all I’ve fucking got.”

It wasn’t much of an argument, but he had nothing to win by keeping silent. It felt like he had nothing else to win at all. If he were really himself—he groped after the thought like it was a box of matches in a dark room—he would know that working with Mannix was what he needed to do to get out of this, if there was any getting out of this at all. And he had done it before. He could remember that, even if it felt like somebody else. He had given Mannix his gun and Mannix was still wearing it at his hip, like a girl would wear a rose pinned to her dress. A love-token. So he must have trusted Mannix even if he couldn’t exactly recollect the feeling of having managed it.

“Red Rock’s named for the rock.” He didn’t emphasize the last word, because fuck that devil bullshit, whether the devil was really involved or not. “You saw the color. You ever seen rock that looks that way?”

“Clay, maybe.”

“And how much clay do you think’s in the soil in fucking Wyoming, hillbilly?”

Mannix seemed to take what felt like half an hour to think it over before he said, “Not much.”

“So it’s not so much a natural place, but there’s a town there anyhow, even if it’s a strange one. It looks enough like a town—people do their marrying and burying there the same as anywhere else. But it's never felt right. Everybody in it’s got something they’re holding in their teeth behind those smiles of theirs. And they never have had much luck keeping law around. You could have figured that out yourself from me and John Ruth not knowing enough to know who their sheriff was before you or maybe even before him.”

“And you weren’t gonna tell me any of this?”

“On the way to Minnie’s, it warmed my heart a little to think of you getting yourself killed.” He left out anything after that. He guessed he might have told him, if they’d lived.

“Well, from what that asshole’s saying now, I’m figuring the whole place for sheep-sacrificing devil worshippers.” His movements underwater-slow, Mannix lifted up part of his shirt and sniffed at it. “You reckon this is animal blood or something?”

“More along the lines of ‘or something.’”

“I can’t believe those bastards took my coat.” He shook again against Warren’s legs. “What’s even the point of bringing me back from the dead if I’ve got fucking frostbite by the time we get to Red Rock?”

“That wasn’t even your coat, and you took it off yourself back at Minnie’s.” Dying, as he remembered it, had been hard work, and they had both worked up a sweat. Their hands had slipped all over the rope they’d used to string up Daisy. “You don’t hear me crying my eyes out about mine being gone, and that was an old friend, right down to the insignia.”

Mannix nodded, conceding the point. “What does a devil town need with law anyway, you think?”

“I don’t know,” Warren said, as the coach rocked to a stop, its joints creaking. “But it looks like we’re gonna find out.”

* * *

 

Red Rock was of the modern and enlightened opinion that even little bits of earthbound hell were entitled to righteous law enforcement, even if most of it was for show, and they wanted their toy sheriff. Hell, they were willing to deputize Warren in the bargain. That was the first laugh he got on coming back to life, that was for damn sure. Even Mannix kind of smiled a rusty kind of smile before he remembered to look offended.

“I’m nobody’s deputy,” Warren said, when he stopped laughing. “Least of all his. And there’s no bewitching you can do to change that.”

The shadow said it was all the same to him, but Warren’s bounty-hunting days were over. “From here on, neither one of you goes out of Red Rock.”

“Meaning no disrespect to a town I _had_ thought to spend the rest of my days in,” Mannix said, “but who in the hell do you think could _stop_ us?”

“The Rock, of course,” the shadow said with a grin that wrinkled his mouth deeply at the corners. “That’s the only thing keeping the two of you alive and whole. Otherwise you’d be just like we found you, missing parts and all.”

Mannix raised his eyebrows at Warren. “That true, major? You all restored to your former glory?”

“Granted I ain’t had time to do a thorough inspection, yeah.”

He whistled. “Well, then it sounds like you do owe the town a little bit of your time.”

“Not a little bit, sheriff,” the shadow said. “All of it.” He shrugged. “Like I said, it’s Red Rock keeping you alive, and if you won’t do your part, well, we can just drive you back to Minnie’s Haberdashery and stake out down to the ground, see how long it takes for the lifeblood to flow back out of you once you’re miles from the Rock. But that’s the only way you’ll die now. Like I said, we’re a little sick of going through any kind of hiring process.”

* * *

 

The town had a house all ready for them. By the look of it, Warren guessed it had passed through plenty of sheriffs before them and that most of those had gone and shot themselves just to get out of living in it.

The shadow gave them a tour, looking the whole time like he knew the house was dogshit but also like it was dogshit from his own personal dog and he wouldn’t tolerate commentary on it. That made Warren all the more eager to say something, but for the moment, he held his tongue. He hadn’t jumped the gun on calling Mexican Bob a liar and he wasn’t looking to jump it now. Mannix opened his mouth a couple times, but a pointed look from Warren made him shut up and subside.

“Only one bed,” the shadow concluded, “since we were only planning on one of you, but judging by the way we found you, I don’t reckon that for much of a problem.” He tipped his hat and departed with one last threat about how they had damn well better be at work come sunup.

“What do you think he meant by that?” Mannix said.

“Cracking his code, I’d say he meant for us to be at work at sunup.”

“No, dammit, the part about—never mind. How are we gonna get out of this?”

“You ever realize how many questions you ask me?”

“I’ve known you two days, major, and they’ve both leaned toward mystery and vexation.” He frowned. “You feeling the cold again yet?”

“A little.”

Mannix nodded. “I feel—feel like I’m way down in a bottle inside myself. You know what I mean?”

Warren did, but had no intention of admitting it, any more than he had any intention of living an endless life in Red Rock. He found a bottle of whiskey and poured drinks. He didn’t take any warmth from it and he didn’t think Mannix did either, but between the two of them, they killed the bottle. A sad waste of liquor, to have to drink it and stay sober.

“I couldn’t taste that,” Mannix said. “Nothing but wet.”

That was some consolation, to think of himself as being the more fortunate one, since he’d at least gotten a whiff of that coffee-anise taste. He smiled a big smile and let Mannix hate him for it, which was consolation too.

The bed in the corner had a couple of wide, dark bloodstains on it, but Warren had seen worse: at least it was free of bedbugs. They loaded it down with quilts. If he couldn’t be cold anymore, he at least wanted to know he could still sweat, and it turned out he could. Since dawn started graying the sky with him not having dropped off at all, he had a lot of time to make those kinds of observations. His eyes felt grainy, his joints sore. His mouth cotton-dry. No headache from the booze. Still whole, though, so he’d been right about that. At least that was one good thing Red Rock had done for him, even if he he still felt like there was a pane of glass between him and everything else in the world, even, like Mannix had said, between him and himself.

When the gray started lightening to blue, Mannix opened his eyes and croaked, “I ain’t slept at all,” which didn’t surprise him. Mannix looked like the kind who would flop around in bed like a fish once he was out, and he hadn’t moved a muscle all night, even to resettle himself.

“I’m thinking maybe we can’t anymore,” Warren said. “A little codicil on the contract that that asshole may have forgotten to mention just so we could have the fun of finding it out for ourselves.”

“You think he’s the devil?”

White folks talked like black folks were superstitious, but it was only white men, in Warren’s experience, who talked like anyone who did them wrong must have been crowned with hellfire, must have been some special and particular kind of bad. He took the shadow for just one more mean bastard, himself, just one who used witchcraft and not bullets or poison. Maybe he would be a little harder to kill, but that was all. Mannix absorbed all this with saucer-wide eyes, the world’s best and most eager student. He was a bloodthirsty little shit, and he wanted to please. Warren liked that about him. And he liked liking it—it was the closest thing to a feeling he could remember having since he’d died.

* * *

 

Red Rock did have its share of ordinary business. Buying and selling, and thieving and murdering, went on there the same as it did anywhere else.

“I think it’s kind of cute,” Mannix said. “Or I would if I didn’t hate all those sons-of-bitches for making it so I can’t sleep a lick or even drink my fucking sorrows away. You know, them still wanting somebody around to adjudicate things.”

He was rattling all this off with while matter-of-factly stringing up a horse thief—the shadow had decided that if Warren flat-out refused to be a deputy, and he did, the least the two of them could do is serve as the hangmen as well as the sheriffs—and there was a little bit of pink in his cheeks. Unusual enough, given how blanched-out white he had been over the last few weeks. If Warren didn’t know better, he’d say Chris Mannix was enjoying himself. Hell, he probably was—give a Southern cracker a rope and he could always keep himself pretty well entertained with it.

“You going on like this with an eye towards frustrating me or him?” Warren said, cocking his head at the thief.

Mannix gave the poor asshole the drop. “Well, you, of course, Major Marquis. I wouldn’t waste my breath on any of these folks. I just pretend they’re not here.”

“Except for killing them.”

“Only thing they’re good for, ain’t it?”

“I could see myself getting fond of you when you talk like that,” Warren said, and then he wished he hadn’t, because Mannix got even more color in his face and ducked his head down, staring at the dead man dangling down below their feet.

That night something happened. After all, neither of them could sleep anyway. They had been going to bed every night despite it—“Too stubborn to live,” Mannix had said, with a slanting kind of smile—so it was bound to happen sooner or later. Maybe for them there had always been railroad tracks leading right to it.

Warren reached over for him under the sheets. Neither one of them had worn a stitch to bed in weeks, half as a dare and half because they could barely feel anything anymore—they still needed to eat and drink, but they burned themselves cooking and dropped forks everywhere because they couldn’t hold on that well to anything besides a gun or a rope—except sometimes, a little, where their skin was softest. So he couldn’t feel Mannix much, and that was some consolation. Not that he was going to pretend he wasn’t doing what he was doing.

Mannix could feel him, though: that much was evident. He closed his eyes. “You’re warm.” Like that was the only thing he was taking away from it. “ _Harder_.”

Warren took his hand off Mannix’s cock and squeezed his thigh instead, and he did that plenty hard, tight as a manacle, tight enough to leave a bruise on Mannix’s sweat-slick skin.

“Oh, you don’t take directions, huh?” Mannix said, opening his eyes long enough to kind of smile over at him, give him a raspy kind of chuckle. “Never mind, that’s fine. I—ah. Please, Major Warren.” His voice gone all dulcet-sweet and pleading, just a shade too pretty to be genuine. When Warren finally got him to beg, he would sound a lot more ragged than that, but for the time being he let Mannix get away with being perfunctory. He resumed.

When he was done, Mannix put a hand over to help him out, but Warren caught him by the wrist. “You know what you need to do.”

For the first time—first time maybe even since Warren had met him—Mannix looked unsure. He touched his tongue to his lips. “Major—”

Warren put one hand on his throat and moved his thumb into the hollow, where he could feel Mannix’s breathing tighten up, where he could feel him swallow. Maybe Mannix was all the entertainment he had in Red Rock, maybe so, and maybe the only man there he would trust at his back, but that didn’t mean he would lower his standards and accept ordinary fucking reciprocity. Whatever he gave, he needed to take back twice as much.

And Chris Mannix had a good-looking mouth. Warren wanted him to think about this from now on whenever he ran it; think about all the ways he could get shut up.

He nudged Mannix downwards and Mannix folded like a bad hand of cards and went: licked the tip of Warren’s cock and said, in wonderment, “I can taste you,” like it was something as sweet as honey. He took his time—rubbed his bare cheek against Warren down there like he wanted to test every inch of skin against him to see what would give him that bare little bit of friction—but he did get down to it eventually. And Warren could feel him. That was something. The real value was still in knowing that it was happening—in knotting his fingers in Mannix’s hair to set up a rhythm and make Mannix stick to it—but the sensation itself was at least there, even if it was just an echo of what it could have been.

For some reason he remembered Mannix slipping off the bed back there at Minnie’s at the end, how he’d wound up on the floor and not been able, with his leg, to pick himself back up. Somehow he had been thinking they’d died together but he was thinking now he had remembered it wrong. Or—as Mannix gagged a little as Warren came in his mouth, gagged and then swallowed anyway as Warren stroked a thumb across his hairline—maybe he hadn’t. Their blood all over each other had been enough to bring them back together, after all. He liked the idea of that red knot between them, as long as he knew how to use it.

Anyway, it gave them something to do, nights.

* * *

 

The town got a little less endearing once it worked out that since the two of them couldn’t die within its borders, they made for damned good target practice. It got so they couldn’t cross the street without someone taking a shot at them. Sometimes they would throw knives—Mannix took one right between his shoulder blades and had to lie on his belly on the bed, cussing and bleeding everywhere while Warren did the best he could to close him up with stitches and some kind of plaster. It was hard to know what doctoring would work for them, when they were coming back from shit that should have killed them. He took it easy on Mannix for a while, and Mannix limited himself to turning over on his side and sucking Warren off while Warren stood beside the bed, one hand on Mannix’s head and the other on the wall. He gave Mannix points for inventiveness for that one. As a kind of reward, he took his time and opened Mannix up with his fingers, giving him a new kind of sensation sharp enough to make him moan even as out of it as he was.

When he was finally better, Warren took him out back of the house, out on the porch with the frost still on its boards, and fucked him there, Mannix bent over the railing, his breath a white mist, gooseflesh all up and down his body. Warren still didn’t feel the cold like he should. It only made sense, he thought, to take advantage of that.

“What if somebody sees?” Mannix said through gritted teeth. He was so tight around Warren that sliding into him was like going into a pair of leather gloves one size too small. He hadn’t sucked cock like any amateur Warren had ever met, but he seemed to feel differently about this. “You want them to send us out of town?”

“Not yet.” Warren repositioned him a little, got that ass of his a little more up in the air, his legs a little further apart. “But I don’t take their mores as that particular.” He thrust forward, the slap of their bodies meeting its own kind of pleasure. “If you’d relax a little, you’d have yourself a little more fun out of this.”

“And you’d have a little less, wouldn’t you?”

He didn’t know if Mannix meant the friction wouldn’t be as good or that part of it being good, for him, was knowing that he would leave Mannix sore, but either way, he was right, so Warren said, “That’s good, Chris,” and kept on.

Mannix did start making some nice, likable noises for him towards the end, his body moving desperately, like a fish that couldn’t stand the thought of coming up off the hook. He had that real good neediness to him when the circumstances were right. Warren liked that, liked satisfying it and liked starving it, depending on his inclination. But he was feeling awfully warm towards Mannix right then, so he did what he could for him.

Afterwards, curled up in bed together, both of them smoking and Mannix still shivering from the cold, Warren said, “I’m going to find a way out of this for us.”

Mannix didn’t even blink. He breathed in a long bit of smoke, tried to puff it out into a ring, and failed miserably. “Thought you would.”

* * *

 

Not that Mannix liked the actual plan any once Warren came up with it.

“That ain’t nothing compared to the Lincoln letter, major. Here I was thinking you were clever.”

“Clever enough to know that I could put a knife in you myself and keep you breathing, long as we’re here, so how about you don’t try my patience.”

“How about I put one in you, since that’s about what you’re planning _anyhow_?”

Warren sighed and tugged Mannix’s shoulder until Mannix rolled over and faced him. He had a set, mulish look on his face that almost invited Warren to fuck it out of him. Probably he should; talking to Mannix was only going to give him the mistaken idea that Warren gave a shit about what he had to say.

“What.”

“I don’t like it, that’s all.”

He sighed. “Either actually argue with me, hillbilly, or get the fuck out of bed.”

“They catch you so much as stepping over the town line, they’ll make sure you bleed out back at Minnie’s with your balls back to being blown off, you want that? I thought you had a for-real plan, not a try-it-and-see plan. And you said you had a way out for the _both_ of us, anyway, and so far all I’ve heard about is you hightailing it and me standing way back here with my thumb up my ass, not doing _shit_. What do you want to go taking all the risk for? I just think we hadn’t best separate.”

This wasn’t on the railroad line, as far as Warren knew: they hadn’t been destined for this. They were laying track on their own now, and probably lining it up to ride them both right off a cliff. He looked at Mannix, at those eyes that he’d remembered the color of even when he had gone through hell and back again. He wasn’t going to do anything stupid for Chris Mannix’s sake, or at least nothing dumber than he had done already, but he hushed him. Got Mannix’s leg bent up at an angle; spat on his hand and got into him quick, fucked him face-to-face with their heads on the same pillow. He wasn’t gentle. Mannix came between them, up on Warren’s belly, and breathed as hard as if he were nearing the end of some kind of race. Warren gave him bruises on his hips and shoulders and neck, something to remember him by.

Maybe that was an argument, because at the end of it all, Warren seemed to have convinced him. Mannix kissed him, his lips chapped and wet. He’d do as he was told.

So in the morning, Warren dampened his coat with clean handfuls of snow and then ironed it until steam rose up in huge white clouds. Mannix shined his boots for him, with a look that said Warren had better not fucking say anything about it. Warren thought about it, then told himself he’d say it later. Told himself there would be a later to say it in, which was iffy.

He needed Mannix to stay behind because Mannix, when he wanted to be, was good for distraction, bloody-minded and foolish and puppy-friendly and hard as fucking nails. They could have swapped roles, maybe, but Warren wasn’t the wait-and-see type. Neither was Mannix, but Warren could make him do things he didn’t want to do. He got a smile out of thinking about that.

It was late March and blustery cold, with a wind that was like getting smacked in the face with a wet sheet. Luck being what luck was, he started feeling the chill after all.

He had to walk, since there was no way of taking a horse without being noticed, but his boots were broken-in and his coat was warm, and he liked the smell of starch in his nose. He had fixed himself up pretty because if he had to die again, he wanted to do it looking like himself, not in his shirtsleeves with his hat off, but he was surprised at the crispness he got in his step just from knowing he looked good. It was something. That and the weight of his gun at his side.

It was only a few miles, and he knew the direction. He had kind of expected to find himself feeling stronger as he neared the rock, but he felt the same, except for the dread rolling around in his stomach like a marble. He wondered if anybody back in town had noticed yet that he was gone or if Mannix was covering for him too well for that. He should have gotten himself shot before he headed out, just so they’d think he was laid up, but he guessed a lack of patience had fucked him up on that point.

They should have known he wouldn’t take well to living with a boot-heel on his throat. But the word out in the wild was that there wasn’t any North or South anymore, just the prissy East and the rough-edged West, where a man was only as good as the work of his hands and the strength of his character and all that bullshit; they forgot what they needed to remember. Like how he had once sat by a fire and listened to some white asshole with a pointed-tip mustache go on and on about the difference between America and Haiti. None of that, the man had said, could ever happen in these United States, not in any way that'd matter. That had been in 1858. The motherfuckers never learned, never got convinced it was really about them.

Well, Warren had plans to bring that lesson home.

The rock was as he’d remembered, blood-red and table-flat. It was warm when he touched it, even though the whole day had barely seen the sun. Warm, but it only made him colder.

He straightened his coat, straightened his collar. Well. There was no sense getting patient now.

He took out his knife.

Maybe the thing to do was walk away, not tamper with whatever lived inside the rock. Men who tried to get snakes to serve them only got bitten in the end and died in agony. But it wasn’t the living or the dying that he minded: he had done all that before. It was the trap of it.

Let it snap on him now and break him in two, if that was what was going to happen, because he’d had enough.

He brought the knife down to the stone. The second the tip collided, a pain rang in his head that threatened to knock him down, but he kept on. Bit his tongue at one point and swallowed blood. He couldn’t see anymore and had to feel his way along; he cut his hands on the rough edges of the scraped stone and then cut into his own finger by mistake. It took him hours to do it, maybe even days, because sometimes he would come to, woozily, and know he’d lost consciousness against the rock that was now as hot as an ember and just as hard to touch.

But at last he finished etching in his name.

Suddenly his vision was back, and he was looking at MARQUIS WARREN written in crooked, increasingly small, increasingly light, increasingly poorly-shaped letters. The rock wasn’t bleeding, which he had sort of expected. The pain in his head was gone. Burns too. The nick in his hand was still there, but hell, you couldn’t have everything.

He hoped the clarity would stay as he wrote the second name, that he had won that much, but if anything, the shriek-howl in his head was worse, and so was the pain, like he was cutting into his own skin with each letter. Several times, he almost said fuck it and cast the knife aside, but something made him keep on until he was able to blink the sweat out of his eyes and stop himself from half-sobbing with the hurt of it all. He looked at the names.

MARQUIS WARREN

CHRIS MANNIX

“One more thing,” Warren said. And though it took him another bout of misery, he got what he wanted. Two shards of rock, as narrow as needles and as deadly-sharp as arrowheads. He patted the rock—not fondly, but the way he would pat a dog that was otherwise fond of biting. Just buying time until it would turn on him for good.

* * *

 

When he got back to Red Rock, Mannix was sitting on their back porch, watching the sunset make the frost on the grass turn bloody and wild. He scrambled up when he saw Warren and came out to meet him; stood there about a foot away from him looking like he didn’t know what to do with himself. He kept pitching forward a little like he was having to stop himself from falling flat on his face.

“It’s been two days,” Mannix said finally. “I thought maybe you were dead or—or gone. I told them we had a dust-up and I put two in your head and you were having a little trouble getting yourself back up off the floor.”

“That’s a decent lie,” Warren said. “There’s hope for you yet, Chris Mannix.”

“You did it?” His voice was low. “You really fucking did it and you really think it worked?”

“I did and I do. But I can’t prove it did until we get to the point where being wrong puts us back in hell again.”

“You speak for yourself, major. My people were always good churchgoing folk.”

“I may have made a mistake,” Warren said. “Saving your life. Or thinking there’s hope for you to live it better, anyway.”

“Now, now,” Mannix said, with the smile Warren had first liked him for, the one that had somehow promised both the bootblack and the bloodshed, “is that any way to talk to somebody who’s gone and gotten you a nice fine present? I was about to give up and open the box all on my own, thinking you weren’t coming back, but it _is_ for you.”

He led Warren inside the house and rummaged around in the cedar chest before he came up with a plain box about the size of a brick. He handed it over.

Warren opened it. Half-a-dozen boxes of matches stared back at him.

“Why, Chris,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

* * *

 

So in the end, they left Red Rock in flames. A devil town, Chris said, should just as well know hellfire a little early.

Warren freed all the horses—they couldn’t help who owned them, after all—and let them run off at a gallop, beautiful with their manes and tails loose in the wind. The two finest, they stole for themselves. Chris amused himself to death with Warren picking a gelding, talking about how the two of them could commiserate. He was talking a lot by then, his face streaky with ashes and damp with sweat, talking just enough that Warren knew he was a little jumpier about leaving town than he was letting on. Well, they couldn’t stay and be sheriffs to a heap of cinders. Some well-meaning John Ruth would come along and see they hanged for it, and if that didn’t kill them, Warren didn’t want to think what would happen afterwards. No, leaving was their only choice.

They stood on the edge of town, watching the buildings burn. The horses didn’t like it, but Warren had a gift for calming them down just enough so they would bear it. It looked like Judgment Day had come, only if it had, he guessed the two of them would still be back there.

Well. Time enough later for them to get what was coming to them. Come to that, time enough later for them to figure out if there was anything in the world that would kill them now.

Then again, maybe he was wrong, maybe he would feel blood spring out of his skin, feel Jody Domingre’s goddamn bullets, some ways into their ride, once they were too far from the rock. No matter what. He had some last insurance against that, though he didn’t know if that would work either.

“Here,” he said. “Unbutton your shirt.”

He liked that Mannix did it without asking why. Warren held up one of the slivers of rock and Mannix nodded. He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes.

Warren pressed the rock through his skin, right over his heart, until the pinprick red of it was completely buried. Mannix panted. Tears were in his eyelashes when he opened his eyes again. “That hurt like nothing else in my whole life.”

Warren undid his own buttons. “Enjoy getting some of your own back, then.”

“Oh, you know I will,” Mannix said, though when he actually did it, he didn’t much look like he did, and afterwards, he kept his hand on Warren’s chest, rubbing him there just a little. It was the lightest touch Warren had felt in months.

The horses were unnaturally skittish around them, like they knew something Warren didn’t, but they carried them north anyhow.

“I can’t fucking believe you decided we’d be better off being colder,” Mannix said, when they stopped to water the horses. "Fucking _Canada_."

“I didn’t ever say you had to come with me,” Warren pointed out.

Mannix scowled and changed the subject. “How far away do you think we are now?”

Warren put a hand over his eyes and looked. He could still see the orange glow on the horizon, like Red Rock was the sun so confused it had started rising in the south. “Maybe not far enough yet. Guess we’ll find out sooner or later. You regretting leaving?”

“No. Glad to be out. And anyway.” He didn’t finish whatever it was he had meant to say, just looked at Warren sideways, half a smile on his face.

Anyway.

His chest still ached; he could still feel the shard of rock inside him. Maybe he always would. But he thought he could accept living the same way he’d accepted dying—just fine, as long as it was something he was going through on his own terms. No matter the pain or anything else. Or even, he thought, looking over at Mannix, the company.

“Come on,” he said, giving Mannix a little push towards his horse so he didn’t stand there all night looking at the fire with his mouth hanging open in wonderment like he’d like a flame to lap its way over to them and suck his dick. “Let’s get going. If we don’t die getting there, it’s a long way away.”


End file.
